I recently was chosen as one of a few young scholars to participate in an Early Career Symposium, funded by an NSF grant (thanks to the vision of Dr. Chandra Orrill, University of Georgia), moneythat gave me some great insights into designing a meaningful research agenda as well as strategies for securing grants to fund it. I imagine a lot of it will apply to the ICT4D Consortium, as well as my interest in intercultural collaboration and innovation.

There was too much good content to capture it all here – but I was impressed simply by the mentors, their candid insights and suggestions, their ideas for ensuring your research and work makes a meaningful difference, and also by how doable it is to secure large grants for quality research. I am in the process of interviewing key people from several large grant awarding organizations and feel like I am getting a much better idea for how to increase the likelihood of a proposal being funded.

Following this symposium I also attended a membership meeting for the International Division of AECT and again was impressed by the quality of people there, and by how doable it is to receive awards like the Fullbright fellowship. After the symposium I was also able to meet with the CIO of the NSF and enjoyed discussing some of what the future of education and technology in education might hold. He invited me to visit with him more next time I am in Washington D.C., and I guess that provides me another reason for a visit there.

Quite often there is money or awards that are left on the table and unused simply because no one has submitted a quality application (or in some cases no one has submitted an application at all).
Even when there are a lot of applications submitted, there is always room to fund the best ones – so why not make one of them yours?